A SUMMER AFTERNOON 121 
sitions from oak to maple as the heroine who 
went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf to 
make an apple-pie; while yet there is no con- 
ceivable human logic so close and inexorable as 
her connections. How rigid, how flexible are, 
for instance, the laws of perspective! If one 
could learn to make his statements as firm and 
unswerving as the horizon line, — his continuity 
of thought as marked, yet as unbroken, as 
yonder soft gradations by which the eye is 
lured upward from lake to wood, from wood to 
hill, from hill to heavens, — what more bracing 
tonic could literary culture demand? As it is, 
art misses the parts, yet does not grasp the 
whole. 
Literature also learns from nature the use 
of materials: either to select only the choicest 
and rarest, or to transmute coarse to fine by 
skill in using. How perfect is the delicacy 
with which the woods and fields are kept 
throughout the year! All these millions of liv- 
ing creatures born every season, and born to 
die; yet where are the dead bodies? We 
never see them. Buried beneath the earth by 
tiny nightly sextons, sunk beneath the waters, 
dissolved into the air, or distilled again and 
again as food for other organizations, — all have 
had their swift resurrection. Their existence 
blooms again in these violet-petals, glitters in 
